NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

nice() adds inc to the nice value for the calling process. (A higher
nice value means a low priority.) Only the superuser may specify a
negative increment, or priority increase. The range for nice values is
described in getpriority(2).

RETURNVALUE

On success, the new nice value is returned (but see NOTES below). On
error, -1 is returned, and errno is set appropriately.

ERRORS

EPERM The calling process attempted to increase its priority by
supplying a negative inc but has insufficient privileges. Under
Linux the CAP_SYS_NICE capability is required. (But see the
discussion of the RLIMIT_NICE resource limit in setrlimit(2).)

CONFORMINGTO

NOTES

SUSv2 and POSIX.1-2001 specify that nice() should return the new nice
value. However, the Linux syscall and the nice() library function
provided in older versions of (g)libc (earlier than glibc 2.2.4) return
0 on success. The new nice value can be found using getpriority(2).
Since glibc 2.2.4, nice() is implemented as a library function that
calls getpriority(2) to obtain the new nice value to be returned to the
caller. With this implementation, a successful call can legitimately
return -1. To reliably detect an error, set errno to 0 before the
call, and check its value when nice() returns -1.